Evolang coverage: Andrew Smith: Linguistic replicators are not observable, nor replicators

Andrew Smith asks what are Darwinian linguistic replicators.  He starts with Croft’s conception of the lingueme.  Croft says that linguemes are external manifestations: utterances including their full context.  However, this might mean that they are not observable, since we can’t observe the full context of an utterance nor the speaker’s intention.  Furthermore, this ignores the fact that meanings are different for each hearer.  So linguemes cannot be observed on the hearer’s side either.  Nikolas Ritt’s conceptualisation of the lingueme suggests that it is an entirely internal entity.  However, this means that we can’t observe the lingueme at all.  Furthermore, it ignores the fact that langauge is ostensive and inferential.  Smith advocates a view stronger than Mufwene’s position that meanings are re-constructed in the minds of hearers:  Hearers build their own knowledge and infer the meaning of speakers – this is a far remove from replicating anything in the speaker’s mind.   So the lingueme does not replicate faithfully.  In fact, we should not expect the lingueme to replicate faithfully, but be on the opposite side of the continuum to replicators.

Smith concluded with the paradox that linguemes must contain some aspect of meaning, but meaning is individual and not observable.

Monica Tamariz asked whether linguistic replicators needed to have an aspect of meaning.  Alternatively, Tamariz argued you could have replication of forms without replication of meaning.  Smith disagreed, seeing a pairing of form and meaning as an essential part of a linguistic replicator.

Smith pointed out that some priming effects demonstrated that people can re-create speaker’s individual voices in their minds, so would this count as faithful replication.  Smith replied that we shouldn’t expect linguistic replicators to be faithfully transmitted.

Luke McCrohan later suggested that perhaps you could have replication of a communicative event- that is, the lingueme is both the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s inference and the external form.

This was a refreshing and no-nonsense take on the linguistic replicator question.  But whatever the right answer, it demonstrates that evolutionary linguists are still struggling to reconcile language in the individual and language in the environment.  Nowhere is this clearer than in models, where typically addressing one aspect compromises the other.

Evolang coverage: Brain activity during the emergence of a grounded communication game

Takeshi Konno, Junya Morita and Takashi Hashimoto talk about the integrative approach to the emergence of symbolic communication.  The talk included details of a hybrid model of cognition for communication that involved a context-free grammar to handle denotation and a neural network to handle connotation.  However, the most interesting work was an analysis of the different brain areas used at different stages of the evolution of a communication system.  They used an experimental paradigm similar to Galantucci (2005) where two human players played a coordination game using computer terminals.  On the screen, players were placed in one of four coloured room, but unable to see their partner in another room.  The aim was to move once (or not move) to end up in the same room as your partner.  Players were allowed to communicate once before moving using a sequence of abstract shapes.  Players could send a sequence of two abstract shapes to their partner.  The idea was to set up a communication system whereby, for instance, a square followed by a circle might mean ‘move into the green room’.

Konno et al. observe an evolution in the communication system:  First, the establishment of common ground (what shapes meant what colour).  Next, a symbolic system emerged with a semantics and a syntax.  At this stage, players were sending messages simultaneously.  Finally, role division (pragmatics) emerged to handle situations where the suggestion of a move by one player was impossible to reach in a single move by the other.  Therefore, one player would make a suggestion, and the second player would either modify the suggestion or confirm the suggestion by sending back the same signal.  Konno et al. note the emergence of the possibility of the same signal to meaning different things.

Interestingly, a recent experiment used EEG scans of participants’ brain activity as they played.  Konno et al. observed activity in Wernicke’s area at the semantic and syntactic stage, but also increased activation during the pragmatic stage of the evolution of the system in Broca’s area, the right frontal cortex and the medial frontal area.  Although this finding was not covered in a lot of detail, and the implications were not fully fleshed out, it’s an intriguing result, and may usher in a new series of brain-scanning versions of other communication game paradigms.  Do participants at a later stage of an iterated learning paradigm used different brain areas to those in the initial stages of the evolution of the language?

Evolang abstract:

Konno,T., Morita,J. and Hashimoto,T. (2012) “How is pragmatic grounding formed in the symbolic communication systems?,” Proceedings of Evolang9, Campus Plaza Kyoto, abstract.

Galantucci, B. (2005). An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems. Cognitive Science, 29(5), 737-767.

Evolang coverage: Bart de Boer on Fact-free science

This is written at 1am after a sake and sushi reception.  I have to praise the organisation of the conference so far!

Kicking off the workshop on Constructive approaches to Language Evolution (proceedings for all workshops downloadable here), Bart de Boer talked about the dangers of Fact-free science.  Maynard-Smith recognised of a certain kind of science that does not refer to outside phenomena, but merely concentrates on exploring models already established in the sub-field.  Constructive approaches and the Artificial Life approach was always susceptible to this criticism, but de Boer recognises that the initial enthusiasm for constructive models has waned while the skepticism has remained.   However, de Boer suggested that Maynard-Smith’s point should be a friendly warning to researchers in language evolution, rather than a criticism, since Maynard-Smith himself was subject to these kinds of criticism in the field of mathematical modelling.  de Boer emphasises that research should never loose sight of the research questions that motivated previous studies, and encouraged modellers to ask whether they were answering questions that other researchers were asking.

de Boer also talked about ‘Cargo cult science’ – a name derived from pre-industrial cults that believed in emulating the technologically advanced societies that they came in contact with would maintain the flow of new goods – a practice that goes through the motions of doing science, but doesn’t actually produce results.  For instance, a model shouldn’t just explain the data which it was built on, but should be expandable to explain other phenomena.

de Boer questioned whether the Iterated Learning Model experimental paradigms were guilty of this kind of cottage-industry science, wondering whether they study langauge evolution or how humans play certain types of games.  However, he did concede that it was a relatively new paradigm and at least it got modellers running experiments.  I asked whether this was a little unfair on the ILM, since part of the motivation of the ILM studies was to counter claims made in that pinnacle of fact-free science, formalist nativism.  That is, the ILM showed that you don’t need strong innate biases to get strong language universals in populations.  de Boer answered, quite sensibly, that these points had been made with the computation models already, but more importantly, there was no point in trying to convince those kinds of researchers – the real audience for researchers of cultural evolution should be biologists – de Boer pointed out that the most prestigious work on language evolution (in terms of journal prestige and citations) is largely by biologists, not linguists (e.g Nowak).  And to convince them, we need fact-free science.

It was a pity, then that some interesting modelling work by Reiji Suzuki and Takaya Arita (Reconsidering language evolution from coevolution of learning and niche construction using a concept of dynamic fitness landscape, also in the workshop proceedings) seemed to be suffering from this malady.  To start with, as Thom Scott-Phillips pointed out, the title doesn’t make sense, since niche-construction is essentially a type of coevolution.  Suzuki described model where individuals could affect each other’s linguistic inventories either directly through communication, or indirectly by contributing linguistic elements to a pool of linguistic resources, like an animal altering its adaptive landscape (e.g. beavers building dams).  Each individual had a phenotype space which was defined by several innate properties:  First, an initial phenotype.  Second, a learning variable where by an individual could bring its phenotype closer to the peak of the adaptive landscape.  Finally, a niche construction parameter by which individuals could pull the adaptive peak closer to or further away from their phenotype. Individuals inherited these parameters like genes.

A circular dynamic emerged where the population cycled through having many adaptive peaks, which increased the learning parameter, which lead to a single adaptive peak, which lowered the importance of learning, which finally pulled the single adaptive peak into many adaptive peaks, which increased the importance of learning, and so on.  While this was happening, the fitness of the agents was being ratcheted up by a series of steep increases, essentially a the Baldwin effect being repeatedly applied.  This is the first of a number of presentations about the Baldwin effect and coevolution (talk by Bill Thompson and poster by Vanessa Ferdinand).

While this is an interesting dynamic, when I asked how the concept of a shared environment or the ability to modify the adaptive landscape applied to language, there was not a clear answer.  I suspect that the distinction between individual interactions and modifying the external environment, which works well for animals building nests or dams, does not work so well for spoken language, because linguistic signals don’t persist in the environment.  However, the problem of how to represent the langauge of a community alongside individual behaviour is not an easy problem to solve.  Suzuki suggested that perhaps the model can be related to an earlier stage of language evolution, but we’ll have to wait for a better description of how this model can answer the questions that researchers in language evolution ask.

Conference session on Theory and evidence in language evolution research

The 43rd Poznań Linguistic Meeting is holding a thematic session on Theory and evidence in language evolution research.  The call is still open, but the deadline is the 15th March.  From the conference description:

The aims of the session can be summarised as follows:

  • to assess the present range of available evidence and to discuss the status of the new sources of evidence
  • to assess the role of theoretical syntheses and holistic scenarios of language emergence and evolution
  • to identify the ways in which linguistic methodologies can be made relevant to answering the ‘origins’ type questions,
  • to identify the limitations of linguistic methodologies alone and thus directions of interdisciplinary collaboration
  • to bridge the gap between conceptions of evidence in biology and linguistics

Evolang Previews: The nomothetic approach to language evolution

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot.

Sean Roberts & James Winters Constructing Knowledge: The nomothetic approach to language evolution
Session 2, Workshop on Constructive Approaches to Language evolution, 13th March

Recently, there’s been a surge in large-scale, cross-cultural statistical studies that look at the co-evolution of language structure are social structure.  These contrast with small-scale case studies on the one hand and computational models on the other.  Lupyan & Dale refer to this approach as ‘Nomothetic’ – looking for general patterns or laws.  For example, they find that the number of speakers of a language correlates with the morphological complexity of that language.  These approaches are cheap, fast and easy to perform.  They use real data, and they might reveal some interesting links that we might want to include in our models.  However, on their own, they have little explanatory power:  We know that group size and morphological complexity are linked, but the statistics don’t tell us why they are linked (see Hannah’s post and my comment, too).

Worse, the amount of data available on the internet and new statistical techniques mean that it’s possible to find some sort of link between any cultural traits (as this set of spurious correlations demonstrates).  For example, there is a robust link between linguistic diversity and the number of road fatalities in a country.  Does this mean that models of linguistic diversity should include a simulation of traffic accidents?  Probably not, but which studies should we pay attention to as modellers?

This talk discusses the new nomothetic approach and presents some criteria to keep in mind when conducting or reviewing a nomothetic study.  We conclude that nomothetic studies can work together with constructive, idiographic and experimental approaches to get a better picture of how language structure and social structure are linked.

You can read our paper here.

Using tools from evolutionary biology in cultural evolution

Levinson & Gray (2012) demonstrate how tools from evolutionary biology can help refine the way we look at human language and human cognition.  Phylogenetic techniques allow researchers to properly control for the fact that languages are related by descent.  More importantly, these tools allow the study of the full variation of linguistic structures, rather than assuming that the majority of linguistic structure is constrained by a limited set of Universal Grammar parameters.  This topic has been discussed before, by the authors and on this blog, but this paper is much more a manifesto for change.

Continue reading “Using tools from evolutionary biology in cultural evolution”

I’m Losing my Science Blogging Edge

Increasing numbers of Language Evolution bloggers are pre-doctorate students.  How must the older net generation feel?

Perhaps like the young upstarts have too much time on their hands …

Yes, it’s a parody of the LCD soundsystem song.  Yes, that’s the Laughing Man icon.

The video was made using the Laughing Man RSS ticker I wrote a while ago.  Source code here.

It’s getting to the point where I’m considering a whole album of Language Evolution Songs.  Anyone else out there have one?

Cultural transmission in flies

Hat-tip to SK for this.

Two recent papers demonstrate that cultural evolution can be studied in the common fly. Battesti et al. (2012) show that Drosophila use social information when deciding where to lay their eggs:

“Taken altogether, these experiments show that D. melanogaster rely more heavily on social information than on personal information when both co-occur and even when they already have personal experience in the environment. When choosing between two equally rewarding oviposition media during the test phase of our experiments, observers tended to emulate the choice of demonstrators with which they spent time during the transmission phase. Considering the short lifespan of Drosophila in nature, rapidly adopting the behavior of the majority may provide an individual with cues to choices that are locally adaptive and prevent costly trial and error.”

In another blow to humanity,  Stoop et al. (2012) (in the brilliantly titled ‘Fly outsmarts man’) claim that an analysis of the mating rituals of Drosophila demonstrate that their body-language has a formal power equal to that of human langauge.  They demonstrate that the sequence of moves in their dances cannot be captured by a regular grammar (a random walk on states of a finite automaton), but must be at least context-free – the same complexity as human speech. In fact, the sequences from males were better captured by a context-sensitive grammar – one step up from us puny humans.  They conclude that “human intellect cannot be the direct consequence of the formal grammar complexity of human language”.

I discover these experiments on the day of the Not Another Lost Generation demonstration against austerity measures which will affect the employment opportunities of young people and students.  And now it seems that we don’t need human experiment participants any more.

Ruedi Stoop, Patrick Nüesch, Ralph Lukas Stoop, Leonid Bunimovich (2012). Fly out-smarts man Populations and Evolution : 1202.5913v1

Battesti, M., Moreno, C., Joly, D., & Mery, F. (2012). Spread of Social Information and Dynamics of Social Transmission within Drosophila Groups Current Biology, 22 (4), 309-313 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.12.050

Evolang previews: Holistic or synthetic protolanguage: evidence from iterated learning of whistled signals

Guest post by Tessa Verhoef

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters.  We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see.  If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot.

Tessa Verhoef, Bart de Boer and Simon Kirby Holistic or synthetic protolanguage: evidence from iterated learning of whistled signals.
Lecture room 3, Fri. 16th, 14.25

In this talk we will present results of an iterated learning experiment about the emergence of structure in sets of whistle sounds produced with a slide whistle. We will link these results to the debate on the nature of human protolanguage.

Continue reading “Evolang previews: Holistic or synthetic protolanguage: evidence from iterated learning of whistled signals”

EvoLang Previews: A Bottom Up Approach to Language Evolution

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters.  Also, the direction of the presentations might have changed between submission and presentation.  We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see.  If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot.

Sean Roberts  A bottom up approach to language evolution.
Poster session 1, Wed. 14th

This poster outlines my research on evolutionary approaches to bilingualism, and tracks how my research question has changed.  I started out with these questions:

  • Is bilingualism a puzzle for evolutionary linguistics?
  • Were early humans bilingual?
  • Why is there so much linguistic diversity?
  • Is there an evolutionary explanation for the ability to learn two languages simultaneously?

Continue reading “EvoLang Previews: A Bottom Up Approach to Language Evolution”